Category Archives: Book Reviews

Review: Gabby Rivera – Juliet Takes a Breath

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Juliet Takes a Breath
Gabby Rivera

Juliet is going to take the summer to find herself. She’s just come out as gay to her parents, she wants to be a writer, and she thinks she’s a feminist. Enter Harlowe Brisbane – the ultimate authority on all things feminism and lesbianism. Surely if Juliet lives with Harlowe some of her empowered feminism will rub off, right?

This has no plot, and yet Juliet manages to get herself into trouble. She makes every bad decision that she possibly can, and forgives far more easily than I wanted her to. In a way that perhaps makes her more relatable, yet somehow things just work out for her in the end. Juliet can somehow do no wrong? Her flow-of-consciousness interspersed with passages of Harlowe’s doctrine didn’t do any favours to the feeling that I was just floating and being told the story, not shown it.

Because I’ve gradually been expanding my own queer and feminist language I understood the pain that Juliet was going through. What I did have a major problem with though was that you basically had to have a vagina to be considered a feminist. Having recently read Trans* Like Me, I felt like this novel undermined non cis-gendered people (cis-gendered means basically the gender you were assigned at birth matches the one that you identify as).

Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but one of the few swear words I just 100% can’t stand was the major cuss word of this novel. Every time I hear it I feel a bit dirty, and reading it just made me feel the same. I felt honour-bound to finish this novel though because it had a lesbian protagonist, but I felt uncomfortable the whole time. I don’t even want to type it!

We need more novels with underrepresented lesbian women of colour and maybe this novel is for some people. Maybe it could empower other people. It just wasn’t for me – a white, slim, cis-woman lesbian with a hangup on a particular swearword. I read it the moment it came in the door, but put off reviewing it for over a month. 3 stars.

Penguin Random House | 19th September 2019 | AU$16.99 | paperback

Review: Camryn Garrett – Full Disclosure

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Full Disclosure
Camryn Garrett

Simone is HIV-positive and she knows that celibacy is the best way to stay safe. She’s been outed for her status before, but she still wants what she wants. And she wants Miles – he’s sexy and maybe, just maybe, into her. But there’s someone at her school who knows she’s HIV-positive, and they are threatening to expose her if she gets with Miles. What can Simone do?

I laughed, I cried, and I suffered with Simone. Her character came leaping out of the pages at me and then I spent the rest of my time absorbed in her life. I couldn’t put the novel down. I couldn’t work out who the ‘baddie’ was either, and I was pleasantly surprised by the ending.

I devoured this novel the minute it came through my door. Although I don’t know anyone personally with HIV, I know something of what it is like to have a life-long condition that some consider highly contagious. It’s a potent novel that is relevant to the times (nothing like The Things We Promise).

So I personally couldn’t ever consider going to a doctor’s appointment and talking about sex with my parents present (awkward!). But it’s the strength of Simone’s character that she does just that – her family is open about sex and I think that’s really important. Of course the best way to prevent HIV transmission is through abstinence, but at least they are talking about safe sex – teenagers sometimes can’t help themselves – and that’s ok!

If the memoir by Ted Neill is too heavy for you (it was pretty heavy for me, remember), this relatively lighter fiction novel could be more suitable. This novel was one of the reasons that The Prom didn’t take my fancy. I read the two close together, and the level of depth and feeling in Simone’s personality was much more powerful and believable than Emma’s.

This novel could improve the life of a teenager living with HIV, perhaps by making that HIV+ teenager feel better about themselves, or reaffirming their self worth. It has the potential to be a fabulous library book in High School libraries.

It promotes healing and understanding and stamps on some of the misconceptions that still surround HIV and its transmission. HIV isn’t a death sentence anymore, even if it still carries significant stigma. Go out and buy this novel for yourself, for your teen, just leave it laying around as a coffee table book. 5 stars from me.

Penguin Random House | 5th November 2019 | AU$16.99 | paperback

Review: Laura Greaves – Miracle Mutts

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Miracle Mutts
Laura Greaves

“Heartwarming stories of dogs that survived – and thrived – against the odds. It’s no secret that dogs have indomitable spirits, that they’re tireless workers and have boundless energy. But it’s when everything seems hopeless that their grit and determination really shines through. Whether sick or injured, lost or abandoned, recovering from cruelty or neglect, it’s the underdogs of the world who have the most to teach us.”

Wow, I actually also learnt some things from this novel! Did you know that there is such a thing as a ‘Bali dog’ type? And that sadly, they’re interbreeding with common imported dogs, so the breed is being lost. Also, that they eat dog (which I don’t have a problem with) but that some people think that they taste better after the dog has been tortured? Anyway, there were some cool facts and there was certainly a swing to also educate the reader about different dog breeds and their misconceptions.

The author truly cares for dogs and it’s apparent throughout the book that she would do anything for them. The people described in the novel with their animals also show that characteristic. Some of the dogs come from some really horrible abusive circumstances, and yet they are able to rise over it.

Do you have a dog-lover in your house? Are you looking for a novel Christmas present for them? This would be the perfect book for them. These inspiring stories have dogs at the heart.

Penguin Random House | 5th November 2019 | AU$34.99 | paperback

Review: Lynette Noni – Weapon

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Weapon
Lynette Noni

Alyssa has escaped from Lengard and into the bowels of the Remnants’ hideout. Hurrying to rescue a new Speaker, Alyssa instead finds herself doubting everything that she’s been told, and wondering what she can do to stop Vanik, because if she can’t, no one can. But is Vanik still her primary enemy? Are there other memories she is missing that could solve the puzzle of why she was left behind?

I was blown away by Whisper and I felt desperate at the end of it to keep reading Alyssa’s next move. I jumped at the chance to receive an ARC of Weapon and read it almost the moment it arrived at my door. Sadly, I was super disappointed in it – particularly the ending.

As a reader, I wanted to be able to predict more of the twists and turns that happened in this novel. That opportunity was snatched from me. Lyss was kept in the dark, and even when it seemed like she might be getting a handle on what was happening the reader didn’t get enough details to fill things in for themselves.

There’s so many actions that happen all at once that I felt like the book didn’t stop moving long enough for me to really think about what was going on. Another source of frustration was that I didn’t understand where Alyssa and Cami’s relationship came from. I know that they were beginning to be close for the first novel, but the level of codependency is squirm inducing. Cami seems like a bundle of pathetic whispers and every time she and Lyss had a scene together it made me want to claw out my eyes.

In my comment from the first novel I said: “I guess now I fear that the second novel will suffer from a gooey protagonist.” And indeed, Weapon is undermined by the love interest shown by Alyssa at any boy who seems to look at her nicely. And if it’s not her romance derailing the action, it’s someone else’s!

Having reviewed this novel, I’ve decided I dislike it more than I like it. I was just so disappointed. Read it so that you finish the duology, but don’t expect the breathtaking wonder that you might have experienced with Whisper. 3 stars from me.

Allen & Unwin | 1st November 2019 | AU$19.99 | paperback

Review: Kim Liggett – The Grace Year

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The Grace Year
Kim Liggett

Tierney James has always bucked the trends. She’s not content to be married off and spend her life producing babies. She wants to just survive her Grace year, lose the ‘magic’ she possesses and be able to go to farming. But as the Grace year begins, she realises that real magic could be afoot, and that it’s going to take more than common sense to get the girls working together.

I received this novel in early September, and it shouldn’t have taken me more than a month to review. I found myself almost equally repulsed and enjoying the novel, and equally believing and disbelieving at the girls’ behaviour. There were plenty of twists, and magic going on, so many that to review the book in full would spoil them. That being said…

Arg! The protagonist at times made me want to hit my head against the wall. I was somewhat disappointed in the ending. Tierney gave up her freedom for that? I can’t believe that she did. To discuss this more would be too much of a spoiler. But still! One of the things she says she’ll never do, she does.

What I would have liked to know was why they didn’t leave one girl behind each time to try to improve things for the next group. Surely not all the girls just want to be married? Or they know they have no man to go back to? I just find it impossible that they would let these things happen time and time again, even if that’s the culture. Not everyone has siblings to be thrown out after all.

I don’t think I would reread this, but I’m going to recommend it to a friend. 4 stars from me. Creepy, and so good and so bad at the same time.

Penguin Random House | 15th October 2019 | AU$32.99 | paperback

Review: Rainbow Rowell – Wayward Son

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Wayward Son
Rainbow Rowell

Simon’s defeated the enemy and found true love. So why can’t he make it off the couch? Bunce and Baz are going to college and experiencing life, but Simon just can’t face it. What’s the point when you’ve achieved your life aim? Bunce stages an intervention – a road trip across America is just what they need.

Rainbow Rowell’s novels are usually a 100% love from me (Fangirl and Eleanor and Park). In fact, I often feel urged to reread Fangirl (has it been 5 years since I reviewed it already? wow!). When I saw this one in the publicity catalog I even told the publisher that I’d possibly kill to get my hands on it. With hype like this, and the avid fan following Rowell has, I had high expectations.

Somehow the nature of this novel is that you don’t become too attached to any of them, and unfortunately that’s what made Rowell’s other novels speak to me so deeply in the past. At one point a character was introduced and I wondered how they could possibly be relevant if they get mindwiped! Overwhelmingly I felt like there were too many characters that I needed to care about, and so I felt myself caring less about them overall.

You wonder at first what the main plot point of this novel is going to be. Surely it can’t just be following two magicians, a werewolf and a demon across America in a convertible? Nope! It’s not! But Simon, Bunce and Baz unpacking their feelings around having overcome the enemy from Carry On could have had more air time. If child soldiers are a theme that Rowell wanted to address, and PTSD, I wanted more of it. Less ‘fluff’ somehow. There’s being lighthearted, and then there’s just blatantly brushing off problems.

I found myself underwhelmed by this novel. I don’t know whether it’s because I hadn’t read the first book (oops) or that there was something inherently lacking in it. I don’t really understand why Simon is so confused about his relationship with Baz all of a sudden. I do want to go back and read the first book to see what I missed, and maybe identify what I really needed to know to enjoy this novel to its fullest.

Personally, I’d keep the wings. There are some other issues that are left unaddressed, such as Baz’s inevitable non-aging compared to his friends and how he’ll deal with that in the future. And Bunce’s overwhelming nature of, well, being Bunce. The novel ends on a cliffhanger, but I’m just not that excited for the third. 3 stars from me.

Pan Macmillan | 24th September 2019 | AU$17.99 | paperback

Review: Saundra Mitchell – The Prom

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The Prom
Saundra Mitchell

Emma Nolan wants to go to Prom like every other girl, and dance. The only problem is that in small town Indiana there’s no chance she’ll be able to take her girlfriend the way she dreams of. Alyssa isn’t ready to get out of the closet, and her mom certainly doesn’t want to hear even a hint of her dating a girl. Alyssa’s in charge of organising the prom, so everything will be fine, right?

I found myself disappointed in the level of depth in this novel. Ok, the prom is cancelled because the protagonist wants to take a same-sex partner. Then it’s not cancelled, because Broadway stars come to save the day (they are of course pushing their own agenda). Maybe it’s because I’ve seen this concept basically done before by Julie Anne Peters It’s our Prom (so deal with it).

Emma gives up far too easily, and also forgives too easily! Emma living with her grandmother because her parents kicked her out is just written off as normal and hardly upsetting at all – which I doubt. And then the bad guys magically just reform from being told off. Likely? No.

It’s based on a ‘Hit Broadway Musical’. Why does it have to be a musical before it’s a novel? Why can’t they just write a decent book? Maybe it works better with singing and dancing, and having that playing in my head at the same time might have bumped up the reading experience for me.

I’m really happy to see big publishing houses like Penguin getting into queer fiction, I’m just sad that there isn’t an original novel here. 3 stars from me for an underwhelming read.

Penguin Random House | 17th September 2019 | AU$16.99 | paperback

Review: NDF novels #2

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These are some short reviews of novels that I started and couldn’t finish. I’ll probably pass them onto a friend or attempt to sell them to a local bookstore. Sing out if you want them!

Meaghan Wilson Anastasios – The Honourable Thief / The Emerald Tablet

I started The Honourable Thief, and then abandoned it because it was so slow to get started and I couldn’t respect the aging male protagonist. I went in expecting Indiana Jones style action and tension, and got painstaking, painful details of Benedict’s surroundings (and honestly I wasn’t that interested in them).

Fast forward a year, and I found myself on an aeroplane trapped with only The Emerald Tablet to read (I’d completely forgotten about even reading the first novel). Sadly, I found that it had many of the same problems as the first. I hated Benedict Hitchens and his bumbling self-assuredness, and I detested Eris, his love interest. One of the earliest scenes is Eris pleasuring herself while she thinks about Benedict, and the whole thing made me twitch awkwardly on my seat. There was no need to go there!

Pan Macmillan | 31st July 2018 | $29.99 | paperback
Pan Macmillan | 25th June 2019 | $29.99 | paperback

Peter James – Absolute Proof

I put off reading this novel for a long time because the blurb about proving God’s exisitance and reporting it in the news didn’t sound appealing to me. Then I realised that I had enjoyed Peter James’ novel Love You Dead. So I thought I would try out Absolute Proof. Unfortunately it was just as bad as I expected. It had too many characters, too many conflicting and confusing storylines and an unconvincing protagonist (who I assume was the journalist).

Pan Macmillan 25th September 2018 | AU$29.99 | paperback

Corey Ann Haydu – OCD Love Story

I picked this up for a lighthearted holiday read, but sadly found myself irritated at the protagonist’s stupid thoughts. Obsessed by two or three guys at once? It felt like the author was making light of what is actually a very serious obsession. Bea even already has a restraining order against her! And her best friend is useless. No. Don’t touch this one. Maybe the bright pink cover should have given it away for me…

Review: Claire Merle – The Glimpse

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The Glimpse
Claire Merle

A simple test can tell you whether you’re going to develop one of the BIG3 – Schizophrenia, Depression, or Anxiety. Ariana’s DNA test labelled her as a Pure – designed to marry a Pure boy and have Pure offspring. However it turns out that her DNA result was faked, and now she’s relying on Jasper to keep her safe in the Community. When he disappears, Ana has to find him before it’s too late for her as well.

I grabbed this from the library this school holidays and it was a light, quick read that was strangely compelling. I say strangely, because the plotting was really quite thin, and half the time Ana didn’t act in a sensible manner at all. Her being able to hold her breath under the water for a long period of time was somehow an important plot point that was used more than once.

I was drawn to this novel because I’m keen on both genetics and mental health. A future where we have identified some of the genes responsible for people developing mental illnesses is really likely, and is probably sooner than most people realise. And I fully expect that it could cause a divide between ‘crazy’ people and ‘normal’ people. But the fact that they just expect having a gene to cause a mental illness? That’s a total fraud – there’s lots of other factors that are important such as epigenetics, Barr bodies and environmental triggers. Depression and Anxiety are huge, but I wouldn’t consider Schizophrenia that common (although it is one of the most debilitating mental illnesses out there).

I didn’t get why Ana was so special. She’s way too excited about !boys! and not enough about, I don’t know, actually saving other people? She’s so shallow and irritating, and her thought processes totally don’t make sense. What put me off as well was a four year old being so suicidal that they would jump in a river. I guess that should come with a spoiler alert. And then the fact that someone claims to see the future? That took it from barely plausible to hopeless.

I didn’t understand why the Mental Clinics even existed. If people go into them, and don’t ever come out, why don’t they just kill those inside? Harsh of me, but honestly. If it’s all about the money, why bother even testing anything out on them, especially if really poor records are kept? Everyone knows science doesn’t work like that!

Ultimately it’s just another dystopian novel where people have been relatively arbitrarily sorted into the City and the Community to create an elite. If you’re looking for a weaker version of: The Wind Singer, Uglies, or Disruption, this is the right novel for you. I finished it, but I became less and less involved in it as I went along. 3 stars from me.

Review: David Yoon – Frankly in Love

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Frankly in Love
David Yoon

Frank Li needs to get date a nice Korean girl, bond with his father and get into The Harvard. What he doesn’t foresee is falling for a white girl and missing out on his father’s life. When Frank and Joy cook up the plan to fake date one another to be with the people they love, will more get broken than their hearts?

What I really liked about this novel was that it didn’t end at the predictable point of boy-loves-girl-loves-boy. The plot keeps going, and Frank finds himself still continuing on and considering issues he hadn’t thought about. To me it felt like quite a long novel, although I didn’t have a chance to sit down and read it in a single sitting.

Did the romance feel real to me? Sort of I suppose. I didn’t really get a proper picture of Brit and Joy, besides that Frank liked them. I liked how it wasn’t really insta-love as they had at least noticed one another before. I would have liked to see a little more characterisation of people other than Frank – but what can you do when it’s a first person narrative? Well, you can employ funny jokes and casual swearing in a way that makes you feel like you’re inside a teenage boy’s mind.

Apparently fake dating is a common trope? I’ve not seen it in my recent reading, so I can’t comment on it. For me, I found it very believable that Frank and Joy would set things up like this! Yes, I suppose the next step was inevitable but really? Couldn’t there be any other option? I’m also not sure I liked the ending with Q. I don’t think it was necessary, and it didn’t really make sense with the rest of the novel.

I can’t really say much about whether this is a typical depiction of American-Korean life and expectations. At my high school, everyone was European-Australian, and at university the number of people of Asian decent outnumbered ‘Australians’. Some reviewers have complained that this novel shows old-fashioned views of immigrants that speak poor English, but have high hopes for their children. However the people I personally know from similar backgrounds actually have similar expectations placed on them.

David Yoon is the husband of Nicola Yoon – Everything, Everything and The Sun is Also a Star. If you like fiction that has racial impact I’d recommend this novel, or the others. Just remember that it is written to a very American (USA) point of view. 4 stars from me.

Penguin Random House | 12th September 2019 | AU$12.99 | paperback